In a cloud computing environment, computing is delivered as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network, such as the Internet. In such an environment, computation, software, data access and storage services are provided to users that do not require knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.
In a virtualized computer environment, such as may be implemented in a physical cloud computing node of the cloud computing environment, the virtualized computer environment includes a virtual operating system. The virtual operating system includes a common base portion and separate user portions that all run on a physical computer. The physical computer is referred to as a host. The common base portion may be referred to as a hypervisor and each user portion may be called a guest. Each guest is a logical partition of physical resources of the computer. A guest operating system runs on each guest, and the guest appears to the guest operating system as a real computer. Each guest operating system may host one or more virtual machines.
An image of the virtual operating system contains many pieces of unique metadata that are often generated on the first boot to ensure randomness and security, such as a RSA key, a Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID), a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and a Lightweight Third-Party Authentication (LTPA) key. Currently, the virtual machine generates these metadata at deployment time. Since some of the metadata requires extensive time to generate, the deployment time of the instance of the virtual machine can be lengthy. If, however, the virtual machine can be relieved of generating such metadata, the deployment time could be lessened. As a result, instead of the cloud's limited resources being used on first-boot activities, such as generating these first-boot metadata, such resources could be used for other activities.